


Priority 0

by Chromat1cs



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: AKA tissues and taking turns in the bathroom, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Muggle, Explicit Sexual Content, First Dates, Flirting, Fluff and Humor, Game Development, Getting Together, Los Angeles, M/M, Maintenance Worker Sirius, Meet-Cute, Programmer Remus, Texting, Workplace, and Minerva is the cat, ask me about my intimate knowledge of crunch, in this house we say no to UTIs, realistic post-coital goings-on
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-27
Updated: 2019-11-27
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:27:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21586843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chromat1cs/pseuds/Chromat1cs
Summary: The programmer fixes bugs. The handyman fixes pipes. The cat is the only one between the three of them with any common sense at all.(Or, Remus finds himself very attracted to and very distracted by an unexpected man in the middle of incessant crunch at work.)
Relationships: Marlene McKinnon/Dorcas Meadowes, Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Comments: 41
Kudos: 399





	Priority 0

**Author's Note:**

> some of the most fun work to write comes from drabbles, and [this one](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18844120/chapters/45983479) DEFINITELY had more mileage on it than what was written. I think we all like the idea of Sirius with a toolbelt.
> 
> Enjoy!

From: james@lumossoftworks.com   
To: [Team]

Y’all,

We’re back from Expecto East! Hope you had a productive week while we were away, we owe our collective ass to Marlene for overseeing scrums. Thanks again to those of you who were able to come along and chat with the folks we needed to rub elbows with, and thanks AGAIN-again to everyone who hung back and kept chipping away at the vertical slice.

Now for some tough love:

I can’t stress how much we need to  _ not _ talk about Krill outside the office. I had to do a shitload of damage control after a leak got out during the conference and that bungled a pretty important meeting, so now on top of that we have half the internet thinking it’s a fake leak while the other half tries prying at every proxy we have around our shit and legal is going to have to double down on making sure nobody else goes sniffing for the IP.

No chatter about the project codename.

_ No _ chatter about the IP.

On God, DEFINITELY no chatter about the project itself. Need I remind you, that’s a breach of NDA.

I don’t care if it’s your grandmother who still calls your Playstation “the Sega.”

ZIP. 

LIPS.

Okay! Love you all, hugs and kisses, good to be home, xoxoxoxo   
\- James

—

Remus skims the email and snorts. Pete glances over at him at the same time from his adjacent desk, his bushy eyebrows up with the same sort of  _ Oh Shit _ schadenfreude one might expect from a third grader watching a classmate get sent to the office.

“Who do you think talked?” Pete’s whisper is theatrical at best, and Remus notices Marlene watching him from overtop of her monitor across from the two of them. It’s weird to have the office back to full capacity after a conference week—Remus had gotten used to the quiet of their skeleton crew, he and Pete crunching their fingers to the bone hammering out the hard-code scaffolding for their combat and questing system with nothing to distract them besides the bone-still quiet of a few artists hashing out final environment roughs for the demo level.

Glancing quickly at the production corral where Lily and James are both leant intently toward the phone speaker behind shut doors on a conference call, Remus bites his lip. “I dunno, maybe Caradoc?”

“Nah, he knows his shit. He barely talks to anyone anyways.”

Remus hums his agreement, blithely watching the blinking reticle at the end of his last line of code on the portrait monitor to his left. Caradoc leads QA and hardly even leaves the office, let alone spills to press. Normally Remus doesn’t play into office gossip, but it’s been a stressful week—fuck crunch, fuck vertical slices, fuck prepping for the next conference—and he welcomes the chance to alleviate some of the pressure. He holds in a shit-eating grin. “Dorcas?”

“Fuck you, Lupin, you think I even know how to read?”

He and Pete both dissolve into badly-quieted snickering as Dorcas hisses the jab at them from her desk just behind theirs. Remus twists to give her a saccharine little shrug and she narrows her eyes, massive headphones moved off from one ear, with a tidy little smirk on her mouth. “Besides,” she mutters, twirling her stylus pen between two fingers like a drumstick, “it was Gilderoy.”

Pete balks, those big blue eyes of his wide as dinner plates. Earnest surprise sparks through Remus’ guts, and a pained sound from Marlene pulls their collective attention back over to her desk where Remus watches her give a  _ Really-Seriously-Are-You-Fucking-Kidding-Me-Right-Now _ look at Dorcas.

“What did we say about conjecture?” Marlene hisses through gritted teeth.

“That’s it’s bad for morale, but this isn’t conjecture.” Dorcas’ attention is fixed very pointedly back to her screen and her pen is back to her tablet with tidy little strokes as she sculpts away at the next model for yet another dungeon wall or loot chest. An awkward silence falls and Dorcas rolls her eyes. “It’s true. Gil had too much to drink at a party and blabbed to a cute woman with a press pass. He was bragging about it during the flight back, I had the fucking seat right next to him.”

Pete looks quickly back at Marlene as though to confirm the rumor with all her community liaison wisdom. She waffles for a moment, a coil of her well-tended pouf of hair wound around and around her little finger out of nervous habit, before heaving a withering sigh and nodding once. “Yeah.”

Remus bites down on his lip and holds in a laugh as he and Pete share another disbelieving stare, and Marlene stands up quickly and points at them. “Not a  _ fucking word _ though, you hear me? There’s a reason James didn’t name names in that email.”

“Aye aye,” Remus pipes up, mocking a salute. Marlene frowns before sitting back down slowly and fixing her stare back to her computer as though determined to ignore the idiot programmers always hell-bent on making her day a bit more unpredictable than she had planned. Remus cracks his knuckles, scoring the quiet hum of their computer towers and the vague thrum of office quiet, before Pete nudges him again.

“You think he’ll get fired?” Pete whispers, this time actually under his breath. Remus thinks back to all the times Gilderoy has improperly labeled his system changes, fucked up a version control push, or just generally put a wrench in these ridiculously important early dev stages, and gives Pete a mild look.

“Fuckin’ hope so.”

—

**_AZKABAN REBOOT PULLS BELOVED CLASSIC INTO THE 21ST CENTURY_ **

_ Rita Skeeter — Today at 9:05AM _

_ Strap in, everyone, our adolescence is getting one hell of an upgrade. _

_ According to an anonymous source at last week’s Expecto East conference, Lumos Softworks—the breakout indie powerhouse who brought you 2017’s overnight RPG hit “Patronus X”—has acquired the rights to the long-defunct IP for everyone’s favorite genre-bending PC megatitle: "Azkaban." _

_ What does this mean for longtime Azzies? The wait in fan purgatory will be over soon, with an announcement of the reboot allegedly coming sometime before the year is out. What does this mean for anyone who was living under a rock in 2002? You’re about to have a brand new obsession. _

_ “It’s going to be big,” our source alleges, “bigger than the original with a complete overhaul of art and systems and sound, everything. Remember all the expansion packs? Combine those with the base game, then double it—that’s how big we’re aiming.” _

_ There’s no confirmed release date from our source, but rest assured that we’ll all be getting a taste of that dungeon air again before too long. I for one can hardly wait to see what all our forum sleuths are able to dig up in the meantime! _

_ Go forth, Azzies :) _

—

“Minnie-moo!,” Remus crows as he bunts his front door shut behind him with his heel. The Los Angeles sky is already long-dark through the windowed little porch door to which his sitting room opens in the hovel of his first-floor apartment, but Minerva comes bounding out of the bedroom with a cheerful little meow in response to Remus’ arrival as though he had just called her for breakfast time. He sets the heft of his groceries on the kitchen counter and scoops the lanky little cat up from one of the barstool chairs to cuddle her close in one fell swoop.

“Gilderoy is such a fucking idiot,” he croons against Minnie’s forehead as he scritches her behind the ears and feels her begin purring that loud, wake-the-dead purr of hers. “I hope James puts him out on his ass and he never gets hired again, what do you think?”

Minerva gives him another solid yowl in his arms and presses her paw against Remus’ chin. Remus raises his eyebrows at her in mock surprise. “Oh yeah? You think he’ll get blacklisted and have to pivot out of games?” Wriggling up onto his shoulder, perching her seat in the crook of Remus’ arm as she nuzzles against his neck, Minerva gives a little  _ bleurp _ around the idle-motor rattle of her purring. Remus pats her twice on her back and heads into the bedroom to change into his lazy clothes, Minerva surveying like a pirate’s parrot. “I like the way you think, Meemo.”

Remus is in his sweatshirt and compression shorts in a flash, fairly ecstatic to have a Friday night not too badly eaten up by working late or being dragged out somewhere to schmooze—or, even worse, network—alongside Lily or James or Marlene.  _ We’re lucky we have a programmer who likes community facing, _ they’ve all told him before in one way or another, and while Remus appreciates the sentiment he’s never had the balls to tell them it’s far less of him  _ liking _ community facing and much more of him being able to talk about things that just...aren’t programming.

For instance, he muses as he adds a few presses of the thirty-second button to the microwave timer and flips the TV on to the middle of the last episode on which he left off, Remus fucking loves antiquing shows.

The frozen Indian food is as good as ambrosia after the hell of a week just past—but honestly, every week sprinting toward a looming milestone is a hell of a week. Prepping a demo is a gauntlet and a half, debugging everything they’re trying to overhaul is an absolute nightmare, the mental gymnastics necessary in corralling all the reports and errors coming in from QA has ramped up from Manageable to Barely Treading Water; it’s nothing new, really, it’s par for the course. But it’s _fucking Azkaban,_ and Remus will die mad about it if he doesn’t live to see his name credited as Lead Systems Designer on the reboot of the title that defined his entire childhood. So he’ll keep himself afloat with delicious frozen food, come home far past dark to nothing but Minerva, and the entire backlog of _Flea Market Miracles,_ and—

“Fuck!”

—and his apartment with its haunted pipes.

Remus leaps back, his already dirtied plate instinctively yanked away from the sink’s spray of ugly rust-colored fluid that is decidedly  _ not _ water. “Shit,” he swears again just behind his teeth, cutting the faucet and dropping the plate noisily into the sink.

A curious little meow warbles up from the couch. Remus sighs, staring at the uneven pattern of vindaloo sauce sluicing together with the silty results of his fucked-up plumbing. “It’s okay, Minnie. Fucking sink again.”

He’s filed about seven-and-a-half maintenance reports since signing his 12-month lease here, much closer to the Lumos offices than his last place and a little more affordable with the role raise after James promoted him to lead—four reports for the sink and the other three-ish for the shower. Leaks, stoppages, strange sounds, the whole nine yards. At the very least, the toilet hasn’t been acting up.

Remus has come home each time to a neat little  _ While You Were Out _ slip of paper on the kitchen counter, filled out with a cramped and slanting hand of check marks and the initials  _ SB  _ to certify that his plumbing should be back in order for the couple of days or weeks of easement Remus gets until it all starts falling apart again. He keeps them all in his junk drawer, neon green and crumpled together like some kind of weirdly-large confetti, unsure whether or not he should throw them away or keep them for some sort of insurance in case his landlord ever decides to call his bluff on the litany of repairs.

Remus is only glad he doesn’t have to pay for it himself. Fuck renting, but at least none of the worst of it is on his dime. 

He fires off a message to the maintenance hotline, with the two little fire icons on either side of the contact title saved under "SHIT'S FUCKED"— _ kitchen pipes in #260 acting up, sludgy rust comes out instead of water— _ while someone on the television details an old eastern vase that could be valued anywhere between twenty or twenty-thousand dollars. Minnie curls up on Remus' shoulders when he sits back down on the couch, purring away, and Remus scritches her softly behind the ears and is quietly eager for the empty sort of weekend ahead in which he finally won't be working.

—

The knock on the door wakes Remus sharply, his face pressed hard into his pillow in the thick of the sort of sleep he only gets when he's largely clear of impending deadlines and can quit running the task list through his mind as he drifts off. He flails out for his phone and nearly topples it from the bedside table in the process, fumbling it front of his face to squint at the time and the message notification on the screen:

🔥SHIT'S FUCKED🔥 -   
_ Work order 7881 processed. Expect maintenance arrival between 8:00AM and 10:00AM.  _

Remus yelps an undignified sound of surprise still halfway in the throes of sleep to see it's just past 9:15. He vaults up from bed and crams on a sweatshirt, forgetting to put actual pants on as he shoves his glasses onto his face and careens out of the bedroom. Another tidy knock raps onto the door just as Remus rounds the turn into the entryway, and Remus forgets to hesitate and think perhaps he might look a little bit half-dead after throwing himself into waking so violently before pulling the door open.

“Shit,” he hisses, the hallway triangling into view through the bleary slice of morning,  _ Shit, _ his first word to the maintenance person standing on his doorstep. Remus blinks.  _ Shit. _

He’s gorgeous. Long, dark hair twisted up in a knot on top of his head; corded arms threaded with lithe tattoos barely reigned under the sleeves of a worn work shirt; a toolbelt, a  _ fucking toolbelt, _ slung low on his hips; well-trod boots with thick soles, extremely likely to be steel-toed. Remus is blushing, he knows he’s blushing. He focuses on the man’s face and tries not to whimper out a weak and approving greeting, leaning slightly to hide behind the door as subtly as possible. 

“Oh, hey, you’re home!” 

Remus blanches. The man is smiling at him with his hand outstretched, and the only thought Remus can faithfully process in the moment is that he’s got perfect teeth. “G’morning,” he mumbles, taking the offered hand and shaking—his grip is strong and warm, and Remus ignores that fact  _ bodily. _

“Sink again? Y—oh  _ hello, _ princess!”

The maintenance man’s face lights up and he drops Remus’ hand, leaving Remus confused and guessing when the man sinks into a crouch. Minerva’s collar tinkles happily and she lets out a little chirp from behind the door, slipping her way through Remus’ ankles to rub along the man’s legs and purr up at him. He scratches immediately under her chin, making little cooing nonsense sounds—Remus is suddenly trying very hard not to melt. “That—uh,” he stammers, clears his throat, starts again; “that’s Minnie, she’s super friendly most of the time.”

“Minnie!” The maintenance man continues fawning over the cat, glancing up at Remus with a handsome smile that has Remus thinking of the beach just a few blocks away and a cold drink and— _ No, stop it, STOP it.  _ “She’s been my assistant whenever I’ve been here when you’re out, she might actually be reaching journeyman status at this point. Isn’t that right, Minnie?”

Minerva meows at him matter-of-factly, as though demanding her own certificate. Remus winces slightly. “Ah, sorry, I hope she hasn’t bothered you. I always try to corral her when I know maintenance is coming by, but she’s an escape artist.”

The maintenance man laughs and scoops Minerva into his arms, easy as anything, as the little ham herself curls comfortably into a lounge across those forearms—those perfect, olive-bronze, latent-strength-incarnate forearms that have Remus thinking idly on some of the fashion spreads he used to save under his bed when he was a teenager.

Not for the first time, Remus is acutely jealous of his cat.

“No problem at all, I love cats,” the man hums. Remus feels his face heat up again just moments before he comes to his senses and opens the door wider with a stuttering yank.

“It—well, yeah, it’s the sink again,” he babbles. The maintenance man steps in after him, still cuddling Minerva—she peeks around his shoulder at Remus as if to say  _ Don’t make an idiot of yourself, we like this one. _ Remus scowls at her briefly. “Spewing, uh, some sort of mud or rust.”

The man turns to face Remus again, and Remus notices his nametag says  _ SIRIUS _ . Huh.  _ Explains the initials, _ so what might the B stand for? Beecher? Brown?  _ Beefcake,  _ he thinks resolutely, the majority of his brain still catching up with his plain thought.

Minerva meows with approval as though she can hear Remus’ thoughts.

“Well, Minnie what do you say we get fixin’?” Sirius sings into the top of her head, peppering her ears with quick kisses. Remus’ insides are screaming with adoration as Sirius looks up at him and laughs. “Sorry, I’ll quit being a freak and fix your sink.”

“No, it’s—no, you can play with her all you want! She loves it.” Remus flails an ungraceful hand at Minerva, eyes shut in bliss with her ears flattened and purring loud enough to wake the dead.  _ I’d be doing the same thing wrapped in arms like that, little lady, _ he thinks. 

Oh, fuck.

He did not simply  _ think. _

“Thank you,” Sirius says around a surprised laugh. Remus pales. His tendency to lose his filter when he isn’t entirely awake has done him in yet a-fucking-gain. He chews his lip. 

“Sorry.”

Sirius smiles to himself, petting Minerva between the ears. “Ain’t no sorry.” They stand there in the living room, the only completely comfortable one among them the fucking cat, before Sirius gestures at the bathroom. “So, uh, sink?”

“Sink,” Remus blurts. God, he’s probably red as an apple right now. “Yes, right in there. You know the drill.”  _ Oh my fuck, stop talking RIGHT NOW. _

“Indeed I do,” Sirius hums, smiling down at Minerva as he carries her over to the little closet of a bathroom.

If he throws another grin over his shoulder at Remus, the kind that might be testing the waters if Remus were awake enough to do any higher thinking beyond  _ Arms, eyes, teeth, tools, fuck, why have I only ever called in work orders during the week, FUCK,  _ Remus construes it as simple politeness. 

Within the hour, after the sink is fixed and Remus shouts a pleasant farewell from the self-imposed humiliation jail of his tiny bedroom, Remus makes sure he’s heard the front door shut solidly and gives it another thirty seconds before he plods out to pour a glass of water from the newly-fixed tap. The maintenance slip is completed and tidy beside the dish rack, and Minerva bounds up to sit on the other end of the counter and watch as Remus squints at it. 

“Oh, you evil little genius,” he murmurs at the cat, a reluctant grin seeping onto his mouth as he sees the phone number scratched in under  _ Further Comments _ beside a lopsided little smiley face; “You get a week of that fancy canned shit for this.”

—

_ hey, this is the tenant in 160? _

**_Are you asking me or introducing yourself? :)_ **

_ trying to introduce myself but WOW _ _  
_ _ I’m bad at this lmao _

_  
_ _ my name is remus _

_  
_ _ thanks again for fixing my haunted pipes _

__ **_All in a day’s work, although I think your cat_ ** **_  
_ ** **_makes it more play than work..._ **

**_I’m glad you messaged me!! I’m Sirius!_ **

**_I had a fun little crisis trying to figure out_ ** ****__  
**_whether or not it would be weird to leave_ ** **_  
_ ** ****_my number with you ^^;_

_ not weird at all!! honestly like…...super _ _  
_ _ cute _

_ if you’re okay with being called cute? _

**_More than okay with it :D_ **

**_So do you want to get coffee or smth? I’m_ ** ****__  
**_more than happy to keep fulfilling work orders_ ** ****__  
**_but it’s hard to have a “getting to know you”_ ** ****__  
**_convo with me elbow-deep in plumbing or_ ** **_  
_ ** ****_electric hahaha_

_ i’d love that _ __  
  


_ sorry, speak of the adorable devil, _ _  
_ _ minnie was screaming for attention _

_ that would be so fun, my schedule is kinda _ __  
_ fucked rn for work stuff but are you a _ __  
_ morning person? I don’t start til 10:00 _ __  
_ and I could drag myself to do breakfast _ _  
_ __ for you.

_ **with you. _

_ nah, who tf am I kidding, ***for you. _

**_Consider me flattered and blushing like_ ** ****__  
**_an idiot in the aisle of the hardware store,_ ** **_  
_ ** ****_Jeez, Remus :)_

**_Yes, I’m a morning person. Which coffee_ ** **_  
_ ** **_place is your favorite?_ **

**_Or do you want to do full-on breakfast?_ **

_ ah man you gotta show me a ring before _ _  
_ _ we do a full-on breakfast _

  
  


_ okay please tell me i didn’t just shoot myself _ _  
_ _ in the foot with a dumb joke about hashbrowns _

**_Ahhhh sorry sorry sorry!! No, I was_ ** ****__  
**_in the checkout line and someone asked_ ** ****__  
**_me about copper wire because I’m still_ ** ****__  
**_in my work shirt so I look like an employee_ ** ****__  
**_and I ended up showing them the aisle_ ** ****__  
**_and also explaining the difference between_ ** ****__  
**_clad aluminum and clad steel but_ ** ****__  
**_NOW I’M BACK yes, I totally get it, let’s_ ** **_  
_ ** ****_start with coffee on its own_

_ wow okay hello sirius you just got cuter _

_ didn’t know that was possible _

**_My blush-in-public count was down to 0_ ** ****__  
**_for this month and you’re absolutely_ ** **_  
_ ** ****_ruining it, I hope you know this :)_

_ that’s me, Remus the Ruiner _

_ just ask my fucken pipes lmao _

_ yeah, coffee would be super fun. monday _ _  
_ _ and tuesday morning are both good for me _

_ what time works for you, 8:00? _

_ we could try that new place, the honeyed duke _

**_Honeyed Duke on Tuesday at 8:00am sounds_ ** **_  
_ ** **_perfectly ideal, how’s that?_ **

_ beautimous _

**_Cool, see you then, Remus :)_ **

_ okay perfect _

_ i’m stoked!! see ya then _

—

“Dude.”

Remus looks up from sipping the too-full top of his coffee mug, slurping loudly, and smiles at Dorcas. “Dude!”

She narrows her stare and bites her lips together with her own mug of coffee—straight-black, as opposed to Remus’ four sugars—held waiting in one hand. “Yep. Something’s up with you.”

“What?” Remus screws up his face just enough that he hopes it looks natural while he feels his heart tick up several obnoxiously-quick beats. “No. Nothing more than usual, I mean. Task list is a-fillin’ up, Pete breaking my builds, me breaking Pete’s builds, you know how it goes.”

Dorcas rolls her eyes and shakes her head, one long piece of her platinum-white hair floating down out of her chaotic pile of a bun to rest on her shoulder. “You’re such a terrible fucking liar. Spill.”

Remus turns the mug around in his hands as he shrugs and lets his eyes wander a little around the little pocket of a kitchenette nestled here between QA and the hive of audio suites. “I dunno, it’s—I guess I have a date, tomorrow.”

“Get the fuck out!” Dorcas hisses, clamoring down into a sit at the table and dragging Remus to tuck in across from her. Her eyes are wide behind her glasses as she raises her eyebrows pointedly from behind her frames. Miraculously, neither of them spills a drop of coffee. “Will this turn into another boo-hoo-Benjy-dumped-me or woe-is-me-Emmeline-ghosted-me shitfest?”

It’s Remus’ turn to slice his eyes slim at Dorcas. He takes his time slurping deeply on another draught of coffee. “Fuck off, those don’t count. I was new to the city, don’t tell me you didn’t do your fair share of bouncing around when you got here—oh, Christ,  _ no, _ no, do  _ not  _ answer that.” He cuts himself off handily when an adder’s grin takes up residence on Dorcas’ expression, those ice-blue eyes of her flashing with all the mirth inherent in the combination of  _ bouncing around _ and the obvious fact of Marlene’s enviable figure.

“You forget, baby gay, we’ve been hitched since you were even hired here.” Dorcas sips her coffee and wiggles her let hand at Remus, the delicacy of simple gold-and-ruby band on her ring finger at enjoyable odds with the black steel ring around her middle finger. “So no, in lieu of a dirty joke, I haven’t done any ‘bouncing around.’ But,” she leans forward, her chin on one fist, perfect eyebrows still raised and expectant, “that doesn’t mean I’m immune to gossip. Tell me everything about them.”

Remus fidgets, jerking his head to the side back in the direction of his desk. “Come on, Dorcas, I have four different system-fucking bugs waiting—”

“And yet you had time to get come grab a coffee and shoot some shit until I asked about whatever is giving you fuzzy-brain? Oh, no, Lupin, you give me _ details.” _

“We have a demo to prep, Meadowes.” Remus parrots her last name back at her with curly little sarcastic twist to it, but Dorcas’ grin only grows in shit-eating factor.

“If you don’t spill, I’ll push an unoptimized mesh into your next build.”

Leaning slightly forward, equal parts genuinely playing along and fully terrified worry mixing in his guts—because she’d do it, truly, Dorcas Meadowes is the single best person at getting what she wants out of people Remus has ever met—Remus lowers his voice; “You. Wouldn’t.  _ Dare.” _

“And I’ll blame it on Pete,” Dorcas hums, adding more of that false-insult to injury with a giddy grin as she spins up the phantom threat of Pete and Remus acting as one packaged brain as far as the team is concerned with regards to their system scripting. Remus sits back in his chair and heaves a lofty sigh that’s only a little bit of an exaggeration.

“Fine. His name is Sirius.”

Ever weak for people who remind him of his parents, Remus had cracked himself open to Dorcas almost immediately after his first few days at Lumos—Dorcas with her long-boned hands, artist’s eye, pell-mell wavy hair, a near photo-negative of his mother in every respect. He had only just started prodding at his sexuality by then—only just started his foray into letting himself believe that perhaps, yes, he was  _ also _ attracted to men, maybe this didn't have to be so black-and-white after all—and Dorcas was always ready to prod at him for stories of dates and hookups running the gamut from awful to spectacular. Unfortunately the dazzling sort were few and far between, especially with unexpected fixes eating up his evenings more often than not. It's a rare sort in Los Angeles county who can tolerate getting plans cancelled at the last minute. 

"Your  _ maintenance man?" _

Remus tries his best not to blush a disappointing shade of red as he nods and fidgets with the frames of his glasses. "Yeah, we—tomorrow morning, we're grabbing an early breakfast."

“Oh, well,  _ breakfast, _ you might as well start planning the wedding now.” Dorcas leans back loftily in her chair, as though the news has actual weight beyond Remus’ pale love life.

“Fuck you, it’s just coffee.”

“Fuck you right back, how’d you meet?”

Remus takes another sip of coffee and wishes that his tongue would scald badly enough that he could quit talking and duck his way out from under Dorcas’ insistent but all-around enjoyable proverbial thumb. “He fixes my pipes.”

“Is that an innuendo, or are you just straight-up living in an awful porno?”

“Har har.” Remus flatlines a look across the table and stands, taking his mug with him. “Since when do you watch porn?”

“I watch it for the plot just like everyone else, you goddamn degenerate.” Dorcas puts on a falsified southern accent on the tail-end of her sentence as Remus rolls his eyes. She’s the best one, always has been, at finding just the right ways to assuage Remus’ deeper anxieties of which he’s barely even aware half the time.

Back at his desk, Remus settles back into his chair with a subtle sigh and scrolls through the most recent bug reports. Pete makes a small sound of curiosity, not looking away from his screen or stilling the fly of his fingers across his keyboard.

“What’s new?” It’s an easy question from Pete, not asking for anything beyond the bare necessities in that special way that often makes camaraderie with Pete the most refreshing thing in the entire city.

Remus shrugs, opening the highest-priority report in his queue and not looking at Pete either. “Goin’ on a date tomorrow.”

“Oh, cool. Hope it’s fun, yeah?”

Nothing then, blessedly, but the clatter of their keyboards as Remus holds in a small smile and nods before slipping his headphones on and diving back into work.

—

The Honeyed Duke, as it turns out, is not a place built for people with long legs.

Sirius, as it turns out, has very warm knees.

Remus is having a hell of a time concentrating on exactly what Sirius is saying, because Problem The First: he’s wearing work boots again and Remus can hardly stop running the correlation of boots-legs-knees-our-knees-are-touching-touch-arms-skin-fuck-me-FUCK through his head, and Problem The Second: he’s fucking gorgeous.

Honestly. Remus is used to seeing pretty people, staring at pretty people, daydreaming about pretty fucking people, because L.A. has what feels like the highest concentration of textbook-pretty people this side of the Atlantic. But Sirius isn’t just pretty. Sirius is completely goddamn  _ god-like. _

“...but it’s just like, I’m not really into that sort of thing, you know? Is that weird?”

_ Fuck. _ Remus swallows around a wide gulp of his triple-shot latte and raises his eyebrows as though the higher-up on his forehead they go the more it might seem like he’s actually paying attention to anything besides the way Sirius’ mouth moves around his words. “It—no, not at all…?”

Sirius bites his lip, he actually fucking  _ bites his lip, _ and Remus barely succeeds at not gnawing the lip of his cup into dust as Sirius smiles around it. “Still waking up there, aren’t you?”

“Yeah.” The half-wheeze from Remus is embarrassing but seems to pass well for half-sleepiness. Sirius dips one edge of his scone into his own lidless coffee and munches on it for a few seconds of silence between them.

“But,” he says eventually around the last of the crumbs, shrugging benignly, “I figure it’s sort of flattering that they’d consider me viable enough to photograph in the first place.”

_ Right. _ Remus had asked Sirius about what he does outside of work, fairly desperate talk about quite literally anything besides work. The conversation had tumbled headlong into different eclecticismo to find around the city, and then into traveling, and then into the phenomenon of posting photos, and then to the amorphous and fairly unavoidable wraith of modeling in Los Angeles.

Back on track with his own conversational morays, Remus fiddles with the cardboard sleeve on his cup. “I don’t think the term ‘viable’ does you as much service as you deserve, but yeah.”

Sirius chokes on a sip of coffee. Remus swells with pride for about half a millisecond before he scrambles to hand Sirius a fistful of napkins, all the while both of them weathering the ricochets of smiles and breathless little chuckles that look so out-of-place on Sirius’ long, solid surety at the same time they fit so perfectly it nearly makes Remus’ heart hurt.

All in all, the coffee is a wild success. They part with a hug outside that is both all too short and eons long through which Remus tells himself is isn’t inhaling, he’s not memorizing the smell knit into the weave of Sirius’ shirt there in the crook of his shoulder, he  _ isn’t _ —

“I’ll text you, yeah?”

Remus blinks and habitually pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose, perking up a bit out of the fog of woodsy, vanilla-ish smell rushing into every receptor in his body. Sirius is smiling at him, his face framed gently with a few wisps of hair down from another twist knotted at the crown of his head, and Remus nods wildly. “Yes, please, absolutely. I—we should do dinner, next.”

Something flashes past in that maddening blue-grey of Sirius’ eyes before Remus has a chance to latch onto what it might be. “Yeah,” Sirius says with, what is that, excitement? “I’ll text you then. Have a great day, Remus.”

“You too.” Sirius’ name sticks in his throat like a bur, and Remus hopes the sentiment of putting one another’s names in their mouths like some sort of ritualistic trade comes across regardless. They stammer a little there on a sidewalk in the low-angled morning sun, and this time it’s Remus who swallows his nerves and goes in for a second hug.

Sirius embraces him right back, a fervent and kinetic squeeze of a thing. Remus tries not to be so taken with how right that feels.

They finally go their separate ways, and it isn’t until Remus has one leg swung over his bicycle seat that he lets himself check his phone:

**1 unread message:**

Sirius - **_  
_ ** **_You’re an absolute peach :)_ **

In lieu of a pillow into which to scream with the overbrimming thrill that burbles up in Remus’ depths, he completes the ride to work five minutes faster than usual. When he has his bike chained up outside of Lumos’ side entrance—his fingers shake so mightily with the combination of happiness and adrenaline he’s far beyond used to feeling that he has to try at the lock three times before it catches—he pulls his phone back out of his messenger bag to tap out the response on which he’s been stewing for the last dozen city blocks:

_ takes one to know one, sirius _ _  
_ _ can’t wait for dinner, just lmk when! _

**_Oh I will._ ** **_  
_ ** **_Again, have a great day :)_ **

_ you too (; _

Remus stares for a full minute at his screen, mentally weighing the pros and cons of backtracking the winking face with his forehead pressed against the elevator wall beside him, when the universe makes the decision for him. The door opens to the building’s gym with James looking as though he’s running on even less sleep than usual despite the glow of post-workout high shimmering at his edges. “Remus!” He announces it like a clarion, and Remus is suddenly very glad for the extra shot of espresso he gave himself as he slips his phone in his bag again. “You’re here early!”

James chugs from his water bottle as Remus gives him a shrug. “I was up earlier than usual, yeah.”

“Dorcas mentioned that, something about a date? Good on ya!” 

James bumps his shoulder with an enthusiastic fist, and Remus tries not to let his stomach drop more than it usually does when he gets stuck in a one-on-one with James without Lily involved to break up the distilled manic energy he lets off like steam. “Yup,” he says thinly, inwardly vowing to fuck up every value applied to Dorcas’ meshes for the next week even if it means he has to unsnarl it all eventually. “Had a date.”

“Great! That’s great. Well, since you’re in early, I actually had some things we can start hitting with the map system once you get all settled.” James ruffles a hand through the sweat-tacked back of his hair, the product of his affinity for a fairly insane amount of running.  _ It’s the only time I can ever shut off the work-brain, _ James has told Remus before at the few rare happy hours Remus has attended since starting at Lumos,  _ so of course I want it to last for as long as possible. _ “In addition to the rest of the task lists, of course. Fucking demos, right?”

He says it with the sort of emphatic expression only someone fresh off of a runner’s high could ever apply to anything work-related. The lopsided labrador-retriever grin he gives along with it also presents a particular brand of cognitive dissonance Remus has only ever experienced when speaking to flighty older women at the weekend flea market who say things like  _ Oh, this crystal inlay will do positively wonderful things to your pelvic chakras. _

“Yeah,” Remus croaks, suddenly very much in need of even more espresso, “fucking demos.”

—

From: lily@lumossoftworks.com   
To: remus@lumossoftworks.com & 4 others

Hey all,

My producer ESP knows you’re already glaring daggers at this subject line, so I’m not going to try and be all cotton candy-y about it.

Shit’s dire. We need some folks to stay late, and those folks are you. Demo announcement launches next week, and we HAVE to get the quest loop for the second exploration area smoothed out before Thursday or our timeline is royally fucked.

Hit up Mary via the scheduling channel on Slack if you need to tweak any specifics with OT, otherwise stop by my office and let me know if we really need to do some crazy workarounds.

I know it’s really lame to include this, but we all really appreciate your hard work.

Aaaaand the way-less-lame thing is, hey, at least it’s time-and-a-half :/

Also, Caradoc is sending around the dinner order on the hour. Don’t forget to put yourself on it. KINGSLEY, THAT MEANS YOU. GET OUT OF THE AUDIO SUITE FOR 2 MINUTES.

Sorry, thank you, love you, let me know if you need anything,    
\-- Lily

—

Remus heaves a sigh that could sink a small ship and slides down in his chair until the back of his head is resting against the lumbar support. Peter lets him stay there for a few seconds before he takes off his headphones and leans over to look at Remus’ screen and wince when he sees the email there.

“Workin’ late?” He says it the same way one might ask,  _ Is that a rash? _ or,  _ Do you need me to call someone? _

“Workin’ late,” Remus deadpans right back at him. He and Sirius have been texting regularly since their coffee, enough that they’ve got a sort of proto-rhythm going on after just a week of being in touch, and tonight was finally supposed to be their dinner-and-maybe-also-hookup levee to break with the help of a bottle of wine.

“Oh, fuck, Lupin, don’t you have dinner with your man-candy tonight?”

Remus pulls off his glasses and jams his thumb and forefinger against the inner corners of his eyes so fiercely he nearly sees spots. “Yes, Dorcas,” gritted out through a clenched jaw that nearly makes his teeth creak, “thank you for announcing my romantic life to the entire fucking office.”

“Sorry, jeez, just trying to commiserate.” Dorcas sounds vaguely wounded in an unbothered sort of way, and Remus rolls his eyes as he pushes himself back into an upright seat before spinning his chair around to face Dorcas’ station. 

“‘Commiserating’ implies that you’re also staying late.” His frown speaks volumes, evidenced by the way Dorcas raises her eyebrows slightly in the pale blue glow of her tablet screen. “Didn’t see your name in that CC list.”

“My wife has to stay late, we carpool, you do the fucking math.”

Remus scoffs. “Oh, boo, because dicking around on Twitter for a few hours is  _ definitely _ the same thing as untangling code until your goddamn eyes cro—”

_ “Hey.” _

Marlene’s Order-In-My-Court voice stills the little trio of desks, Peter the wide-eyed bystander, and it’s a few seconds before Remus scrubs at his eyes with the heels of his palms this time. “Sorry. Fuckin’...sorry. Yes, I have to reschedule a date.”

“You want me to tell Lily you’ll stay tomorrow instead of today?”

Marlene is giving Remus a look so full of understanding that he almost buckles, but before he can accept the parley another pair of high-priority issues ping onto his queue. Remus bites the inside of his cheek and shakes his head. “No, because I think at this rate I’ll just being staying late until we announce, won’t I?”

There’s a pained little ripple of  _ Yep, There It Is _ that flickers along their bank of desks in that instant. Pete sighs through his nose and makes a quizzical sound. “You could reschedule dinner for Sunday? Or, I dunno, do another coffee?”

“They can’t fuck after getting coffee, Pete,” Dorcas says as though explaining to a child that no, two plus two doesn’t equal five, but you’re so close! Remus groans and sags, letting his forehead thud flatly against his desk.

“Sunday,” he mumbles from there, staring a hole in the dull pattern in the nubby carpet at his feet, “I’ll just reschedule.”

—

_ hey _ __  
_ don’t kill me _ __  
_ but I have to work late tonight _ __  
_ and basically every day the rest of the week  _ _  
_ __ including saturday

_ please tell me you’re free on sunday night _

**_Hey!_ ** ****__  
**_Wouldn’t dream of killing you, also_ ** **_  
_ ** ****_would be really stupid of me._

**_Sunday would be just fine, same_ ** **_  
_ ** **_place/time?_ **

**_Also, is everything alright at work?_ **

_ oh yeah it’s all fine _ __  
_ we’re just prepping an announcement demo _ __  
_ and one of the quest loops keeps locking up _ __  
_ and we don’t know what the fuck is causing _ __  
_ it so of course the senior programmer needs _ __  
_ to stay late and fix everyone else’s shit on _ __  
_ top of the leagues and leagues of other shit _ _  
_ __ already on his plate (((((((((:

_ ugh i’m so sorry _ _  
_ _ i’m in a mood _

**_Ain’t no sorry, I understood…..exactly_ ** **_  
_ ** **_3% of that gloriously-run-on sentence._ **

**_But I completely feel you. And hey, if_ ** ****__  
**_it’s just one of Those Days, maybe it’s_ ** **_  
_ ** ****_better that we aren’t going out tonight?_

_ yeah i guess _

_ but i also guess call me selfish _ _  
_ _ because i really wanted to see you tonight _

**_Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’ve been_ ** ****__  
**_butterflies-in-stomach CITY since like,_ ** ****__  
**_lunchtime._ ** ****__  
**_But if it’s not in the cards, we just wait a_ ** **_  
_ ** ****_little longer :)_

**_And isn’t there a saying, something-_ ** **_  
_ ** **_something, waiting makes it sweeter?_ **

**_;)_ **

_ i do fucken declare, are you coming _ _  
_ _ onto me in my own texts rn???? _

**_Ahahahahaha_ **

**_Mayyyyybe_ **

_ that saying was invented by puritans _ __  
_ who thought the female orgasm was _ _  
_ __ demonic possession

_ but i can’t argue the fact that yes, _ __  
_ perhaps something-something waiting _ __  
_ an extra few days to get you back to my _ __  
_ apartment will make it, how do you say, _ _  
_ __ sweeter

**_Jesus fuck_ ** **_  
_ ** **_Warn a man, can’t you??_ **

**_Christ. I was being bad and messaging_ ** ****__  
**_you in traffic and now this goddamn_ ** ****__  
**_gridlock is suddenly WAY more of a curse_ ** **_  
_ ** ****_than a blessing._

**_FUCK._ **

_ lol eyes on the road, you _

_ i’d say i totally feel you but ya boy bikes _ _  
_ _ everywhere for a reason _

**_Can’t ‘take care of yourself’ on a bike_ ** **_  
_ ** **_though, can you?_ **

_ dhsafjkds _

__ you fucking WHAT NOW  
__  
_ and excuse you how dare you doubt _ _  
_ __ my manifold talents

_ i know my way around all the most _ __  
_ sordid edges of a bicycle seat, i’ll have _ _  
_ __ you know

**_A, I was fucking kidding_ ** ****__  
**_B, how DARE you know I’m stuck in traffic_ ** ****__  
**_and then proceed to give me those sorts_ ** **_  
_ ** ****_of mental images?????_

_  
_ _ hey that second part’s on YOU _

_ all i said was “edge” and “bicycle seat” _ _  
_ _ you filled in those blanks all by yourself _

**_Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you_ **

_ i think that’s the goal though isn’t it? _ _  
_ _ correct me if i’m wrong (: _

**_Okay Jesus holy shit, alright_ ** ****__  
**_Fuck. I can’t believe we have to wait until_ ** **_  
_ ** ****_Sunday. What the fuck._

_ i know right? _ _  
_ _ fucking heinous _

_ fuck the system, damn the man, etc etc _

**_I can fucking see your shit-eating grin_ ** **_  
_ ** **_from here, fuck_ **

**_GAHHHH you broke my brain, dude, what_ ** **_  
_ ** **_the FUCK_ **

_ ahahahahahaha _ _  
_ _ i’m so sorry but i’m not sorry at all _

**_Okay you’re supposed to be working, aren’t_ ** ****__  
**_you??? Get back to being a code wizard or_ ** **_  
_ ** ****_whatever it is you’re doing._

_ scuse me that’s code WARLOCK to you _

_ and I’m waiting on shit to compile _ __  
_ hence the moment of pause in which i _ __  
_ can, as you say, break your brain _ _  
_ __ (;

**_hhhhhhhnnnfbdfhdghdgdfndfdas_ ** ****__  
**_Can you like…….._ ** ****__  
**_Re-code time to speed up so I can fucking_ ** **_  
_ ** ****_see you sooner?_

_ GOD i wish i could do that in general _ _  
_ _ i’d be able to skip so much bullshit _

_ commercials, red lights, render queues, _ _  
_ _ conferences, LITERALLY everything shitty _

**_That’s a lot of freedom there, Remus,_ ** **_  
_ ** **_whatever would you build back in?? ;)_ **

_ ohhhhhhh idk i’d have a LOT more time to _ __  
_ play all the games i’ve had on backlog since _ _  
_ __ fucken college

_ i’d also be able to cook more often _ _  
_ _ i could teach minnie some cool tricks _

_ oh, and masturbate. i’d jack off a lot more _ _  
_ _ than i already do. _

**_GOD_ **

**_Okay, alright, okay, the traffic is starting to_ ** **_  
_ ** **_move again_ **

**_You’re amazing and awful and fantastic and_ ** ****__  
**_horrible and just absolutely magnificent all_ ** **_  
_ ** ****_at once, what the actual living fuck_

_ LMAOOO _

**_I’m driving now, I’m putting my phone in_ ** ****__  
**_driving mode, i’ll talk to you later okay? And_ ** ****__  
**_if I get caught up in garbage and forget to text_ ** ****__  
**_very much until Sunday, it’s 7:00p at_ ** ****__  
**_Huff’n’Puff, nothing super fancy but also feel_ ** **_  
_ ** ****_free to look really cute._

**_Not that it isn’t your default already but you_ ** **_  
_ ** **_know. OKAY DRIVING MODE BYE_ **

_ oh don’t worry, we’ll text before then (; _

**_Hey! I’m driving right now, I’ll get back to ya_ ** **_  
_ ** **_when I’m not behind the wheel ^^_ **

_ <3 _

—

“Alright, Remus, get the fuck out of here before James gets that look in his eye.”

“Which one, the ‘Hey, team, let’s bond!’ or the ‘I have an idea that will take an extra three weeks to implement’?” Pete whirls his chair around to face Dorcas and Remus, Dorcas with her hip leant against the side of Remus’ desk and Remus pushing back from his keyboard with a very resolute end-of-day finality, as he chews out those eerily-accurate impressions of James with such acuity that Marlene chokes on her tea from her desk.

“Fuck, Pete, give a gal some warning,” she rasps, swiping at a splot of hibiscus-red spatter on the edge of her mousepad. 

Standing to shoulder his bag, Remus earns an approving nod from Dorcas in the process; he’s gone with a button-down short sleeve shirt in a muted blue pattern and tan slacks, which earned him a couple surprised-but-guarded nods from the rest of the office today. Lily, co-arbiter of the calendar and queen of email subjects along the lines of the recent  _ Sorry, Sorry, I’m So Sorry _ , had given him an exaggerated thumbs-up from her office window as she saw him arrive that morning. Yes, it’s a Sunday, No, Remus was certainly not supposed to work today, but of  _ course _ Gilderoy had to botch a build yesterday and sent them all into a de-tangling spiral that’s lasted well into this afternoon. Perhaps as recompense for his overtime in addition to the pay, perhaps just because it would be plain cruel to keep Remus from life at large for much longer, Lily blocked in a hard out for Remus at 6:00.

Thank every collective deity for Lily Evans.

“You look really nice,” Dorcas hums, which, in her lexicon of snark, is tantamount to telling Remus he might be the suavest motherfucker this side of the Rockies.

“Thanks!” Remus’ own words feel brisk and vibrant, and he finds with a brief bolt of self-reflection that he’s more than a little bit ridiculously excited. “You’re not half-bad yourself.”

“Damn straight,” Marlene pipes up with stony resolution, but when Remus glances up at her she’s grinning. “Have fun, bike safe.”

“Nah, gonna get hit by a bus.”

“Don’t joke about that!” Pete hisses. Remus rolls his eyes.

_ “Fine. _ I’ll just get car-doored, happy?”

_ “Thrilled,” _ Dorcas crows for the lot of them. She musses Remus’ hair, ignoring his squawk for the fact it will simply get re-ruffled by his helmet, and sees him off with a dramatically-blown kiss.

The elevator spits him out on the ground floor, where Remus ducks into the bathroom to put in his contact lenses. He takes an extra moment to look at himself in the mirror and catalogue everything from his thrumming pulse to the bright-eyed mixture of excitement and exhaustion whirling around in his expression.  _ You haven’t fucked someone in almost a year, _ he tells himself, chewing on that habitual spot at the corner of his lower lip.  _ But don’t be nervous. Hell, you might not even end up fucking. But that’s the goal, isn’t it? That’s what you’ve been texting about for the last three days. Everything has been an innuendo. You should fuck him. But only if HE wants to. Will he even want to? Talking and doing are very different— _

“Holy shit, just go already,” Remus blurts aloud to himself, unfortunately right as someone from another floor of the building walks in to, presumably, actually use the bathroom. They balk, looking at Remus as though he has three heads. Remus flushes, he notices in the mirror, a very deep shade of red. “It—sorry, hyping myself up, you know how it goes, eh?”

The person doesn’t deign to give him anything besides a brief and awkward raise of the eyebrows and plain-toast nod. Remus bustles out, hunched and scrambling more than slightly, and is acutely grateful for the familiar burn of hopping onto his bicycle and pedalling clear across town.

Huff’n’Puff is one of the nicer restaurants in the Valley, and as such Remus has to park his bike a couple blocks away for the lack of racks outside the restaurant itself. He snatches a glance at himself in one of the dusk-darkening boutique windows to straighten out his helmet hair, slaps his exertion-pink cheeks twice, regrets it with full-bodied recoil when someone inside the boutique gives him a funny look, and sets immediately to his left to where the restaurant sits like a humming golden beacon of Remus’ most distilled impatience.

He should have fucking known, stopped at the hostess booth but still being able to see Sirius at their table as though lit from within, that Sirius would look like sex on legs.

“Hey, bike boy.”  _ Goddammit, _ that shit-eating grin shouldn’t look so charming and yet Remus find himself practically melting as Sirius stands to greet him with a hug there beside the table, chambray shirt pressing gently against his cheek. “Hit any unfortunate assholes on your way over?”

“Just a gaggle of tech bros,” Remus deadpans, shaking his head with false solemnity as he nestles his bag with his helmet clipped to it beneath their feet under the table. A small-growing-larger piece of him inside is rioting for him to dive back into another embrace with Sirius and never let go—fuck dinner, fuck reality, let the world burn if it isn’t those fucking forearms bracing his back like a dream and a half—but Remus manages to quiet it enough that he can ease down into their cozy, low-lit booth without trembling. “They had it coming, really.”

Sirius laughs, and bless him wholly for the phenomenon. The little glass-cup tea candle between them flickers its delicate shadows along the lower third of Sirius’ face and if Remus forgets how to breathe for just a moment there in the space of their eye contact connecting in earnest for the first time in far too long, well; that’s just one hell of a thing, isn’t it?

There’s a bottle of nice Sonoma red open already, a shallow pour for Sirius but a hefty serving for Remus when he acquiesces with a  _ Yes, please, _ with perhaps more strength than one might need to muster on a Sunday evening. 

“Hell of a week?” There’s a little smile there at the corner of Sirius’ mouth as he pours, and Remus wants nothing more than to thumb it off like buttercream and lick it slowly from his fingertip. 

_ “Hell _ of a week,” Remus sighs, and then they’re clinking the lips of their glass together, and Remus is imagining pressing his own lips to the side of Sirius’ throat as they both swallow down their sips of wine, and Remus has one thumb pressed hard against the edge of the table with white-knuckled ferocity in his superstitious need to touch wood as he drinks any sort of toast at all.

They’ve toasted, he decides, on that wordless of form of whatever it is that’s decided to float up between them—this unseeable wraith of desire and comfort spun from their shared memories of that first stumbling morning in Remus’ apartment and the coffee thereafter, and every message going back and forth between them like an unstoppable tram carrying at least Remus’ hopes for something solid with them.  _ See me, _ it seems everything has said around its edges lately,  _ understand who am in not so many words, because I don’t even know if I’m brave enough to paint that picture for you outright. _

But here, at last, to Remus’ relief and absolute thrill, Sirius sees him. Over their overpriced crostini and the middlingly-good wine and the beautifully necessary sloughing-off of the past several days, Remus absorbs the way Sirius’ eyes catalogue him like something precious to behold and revels, revels,  _ revels _ the warm glow of finally belonging on the receiving end of someone else’s smiles.

“So,” Sirius is saying eventually, his plate half-done and Remus’ near crumbs on his plate—the day’s fish for the both of them, Remus fairly rabid for grouper and Sirius lamenting entree-envy so acute that he knows, just  _ knows _ he’ll hate himself later if he doesn’t order the same thing. Remus rests his fork on the lip of his plate and leans his cheek on one fist with an expectant look at Sirius’ lofty syllable. Sirius leans back a little in his chair with one eyebrow slightly raised. “I still know next to nothing about what you do for a living.”

Remus snorts, an unpretty sound but he’s nearly two glasses of wine in and the light blur of comfortable easement means he couldn’t care less about anything besides watching Sirius be Sirius there across from him. “That’s by design, largely.”

“How so?”

Winnowing his hand a little in the air in front of him, elbow up on the table, Remus pulls what feels like a vaguely-philosophical face. “When you work in games, every nondisclosure you sign essentially takes a piece of your soul with it during production. If it crashes and burns, you can only ever talk about key parts of the project that aren’t still all caught up in red tape. If it ships, you can usually talk about anything on launch. But if you talk about it before it either dies, or ships, that piece of your soul goes straight into someone’s handbasket and you never see it again.”

Sirius’ eyes are narrowed when Remus finishes talking with his hands. “So,” he says again, a little more slowly, drawing out the word like taffy, “is that all in the fine print, or just your own projecting?”

He caps it off with a sly grin, and Remus discovers that yes, it is absolutely possible to feel himself fall even harder for Sirius. “Depends on the company,” Remus fires back as he drains the dregs of his wine.

“Sounds like equal parts terrifying and thrilling.” Sirius moves to refill Remus’ wine, but Remus finds he’s rather enjoying where he’s found himself and puts a gentle hand overtop of his glass. 

“Again; depends on the company.”

“Care to share anything about your current project with the class?”

Sirius had asked him at coffee the other morning about programming at large—the ins, the outs, the weird and winding path Remus had taken to get himself to his current position, layman’s everything, the whole nine yards. Remus had bolstered the chatter with examples from past projects and popular games with which Sirius might have been familiar, although Sirius’ knowledge of video games seems to start and stop with a limited handful of games he played as a kid.

Remus serves his own smirk across the table and tips his head slightly to one side. “You trying to compromise my soul, Mr. Black?”

There’s a very pale flush that mixes with the handsome olive overtones of Sirius’ skin, pink and barely-there alongside the subtle widening of his eyes. He chases a sip of wine as though it might cleanse him from the inside out before answering, something beautiful and ephemeral shuddering there along his lashes; “Your call, Remus.”

They’re talking about sex now, Remus is sure of it. He manages not to melt and opens his mouth to reply just as their server arrives with their dessert. It’s a cobbler tart of some sort, and it looks beautiful, but Remus snaps his jaw shut again and very suddenly can’t focus on anything besides the way Sirius looks now as though he would like nothing better than to devour Remus instead of the dessert.

It takes a full minute after the server moves off for either of them to touch the pair of spoons perched on the edge of the plate. Remus is sure the entire restaurant is able to hear the hammer of his heart above the low ambient hum of conversation, and Sirius is watching him with such fairly wolfish intent and he carves the first spoonful into the dripping, honeyed crest of the tart that Remus thinks he might very well ascend to a separate plane of existence without leaving the hovel of their booth.

“So what are you working on lately?”

Remus has to shake himself from the limb-freeze of abject craving for just a moment before he blinks and lets a smile twitch onto his mouth. “Classified.”

Rolling his eyes handsomely—but honestly, Sirius does every handsomely so should Remus be allowed to feel surprised by the grace of it?—Sirius takes another spoonful of dessert. “I know  _ nothing _ about video games. Your secret would be as safe with me as a geriatric sworn a vow of silence.”

The instinct to parrot James’  _ Even your grandma plays bridge with other grandmas, and grandmas have grandkids, and grandkids never shut the hell up  _ litany leaps to the tip of Remus’ tongue, but Sirius licks a smudge of fresh cream from the edge of his spoon just then and Remus’ brain shorts out so violently he nearly fumbles the spoon he’s just picked up in a preemptive effort to distract his own mouth. “Uh,” he says clumsily, carving off a too-big chunk of the tart in one scoop, “well. It’s a big title, so you’d really have to keep it secret. No joke.”

Sirius’ eyes light up and he leans forward across the table a little, a wisp of his hair coming down from the brain shrugged down the back of his neck in careless beauty. “I’m great with secrets.”

Gaze fixed on that blue-black thread of hair, Remus pops the spoon in his mouth and takes his time chewing. He can’t tell whether or not he’s biding his time, and what for? But he eventually has to swallow, and he punctuates it with a shrug and leans a little closer just as well. “But even  _ you _ might know this one.”

Oh, Sirius is staring at his lips. He’s looking at Remus’ mouth, and Remus wants to instinctively suck on that corner of his lip but he doesn’t want it to look like obtuse seduction so he settles for cocking his head to the side again and fiddling his fingers into the short hairs at the nape of his neck. Sirius sighs slowly to himself, pushing his already-pushed-up sleeves a bit further up his forearms to Remus’ combined terror for his own resolve and thunderhead of unfurling arousal, and grins warmly at Remus. Remus feels a small piece of himself chip off and crash into the boiling ocean of need swirling in his belly. “Try me,” he says—murmurs, really, and it’s nothing short of a miracle that Remus can hear it over the hum of other diners pressed around them like cotton bunting.

The Remus from two hours ago, hopping on his bike just outside of the Lumos offices, would be railing against the Remus from the present with an iron bar as he buckles to temptation over a half-eaten dessert across from one of the most alluring people he’s ever met in his life. But the Remus from two hours ago didn’t know what it would feel like to share a meal with a man who would make him feel so brilliant by just  _ looking _ at him. 

He buckles.

Leaning even closer, such that Remus can smell a very gentle trace of Sirius’ cologne—smoky, caramelly, woodsy, leathery all once,  _ god-fucking-dammit _ —Remus raises his eyebrows slightly and crooks a finger to bring Sirius to lean nearer as well, and he manages to hold on to his nerve for just long enough to say “Alright. It’s  _ Azkaban.” _

“Are you fucking kidding me!?”

Pride sparks sharp through Remus’ guts when Sirius’ expression flares like a starburst, and he can’t keep the stupid-giddy grin from his face as he shushes Sirius. “Okay, okay, you can’t say  _ anything, _ alright?”

“I played the shit out of that game when I was a kid, are you  _ kidding me? _ It’s coming back?!”

Thankfully Sirius’ thrilled patter is a hiss of a whisper only audible to Remus, but Remus still lets a trip of a chuckle escape him as he reaches up to subdue the excitable jitter of Sirius’ hands by touching at his wrist. “Yes, but you can’t say  _ anything!” _

“Oh, absolutely. Zipped lips. Oh my God, you’re a fucking  _ genius.” _

Another chuckle bubbles up, this one tinged with a spot of self-consciousness. “It’s not all me, I just...I dunno, build the parts that other people put together, I guess.”

There’s a pause then, filled with the muted mutter and clinkering silverware over everyone around them, in which Remus finds himself staring so fastidiously into Sirius’ eyes that a small part of him—the part of him that decided to boil itself in desire, kill itself with the ecstasy of re-discovery—never, ever wants to emerge.

Sirius swallows and his fingers twitch a little with what feels like nervous anticipation around the edges of Remus’ hands. It feels like arrival. Sirius tips his face the slightest bit closer across the table. “Do you wanna get out of here?”

In twenty-eight years, Remus has never agreed to anything more immediately.

The car ride back to Remus’ apartment—the agreed-upon definition of  _ Out of Here, _ after Remus’ shaky deflection of saying Minnie might want to say hello—with Remus’ bicycle secured to the rack on Sirius’ roof. They’re holding hands on the center console, Sirius’ fingers laced through Remus’ as though it’s the most natural thing on the planet, and Remus doesn’t know what to say over the low volume of the top-40 radio and the whirr of the middle-old hatchback engine.

“I’m still surprised you’re not a model,” Remus finally manages to croak to the purple dusk setting beyond the windshield.

Sirius sniffs a laugh so gentle it might as well be a susurration of calm. “There’s a lot of shit,” Sirius murmurs as he takes a smooth left turn through a green light—his hands on the steering wheel are solid through Remus’ periphery, he really is a wonderful driver, why does that make Remus horny? Remus shifts slightly in his seat; “that I had to unlearn when I struck out on my own, and one of those things was being told my only worth was seated in what I looked like.”

“Oh.” It’s quiet and trepidatious, all Remus can really think to say as his stomach twists a little just below his lungs. “Sorry, I don’t mean to harp on it.” A pause, just enough space for a breath; “You’re just—it surprises me. That you’re so into me, with your whole...vibe, I guess.”

“My vibe?”  _ Oh thank God, _ it still sounds like Sirius is smiling with another little hint of laughter in there.

"Yeah, you're...I don't know, you're fucking gorgeous and sunshine-y and so easy to talk to, and I'm a fucking programmer who prefers my cat over most people and only figured out I like men less than a year ago. There's some disparity here." Remus picks at one thumbnail with the other. "Sorry," he mumbles, "goading you into talking about how hot you are eases my nerves somehow."

"Remus." Sirius says it again with that perfect gentleness of his with a smile in his voice, like some kind of prayer, and Remus' soul seems to glimmer with purpose here in the pit of his chest. "We can slow things down, if you want. If any of this is too much for you, I don't want to feel like you have to...keep up, with whatever track record I have behind me."

In truth, Remus hadn't even thought to think about the sort of avenues Sirius may or may not have taken before they started talking. He shakes his head. "It's not a you-and-me thing. This is fine, I—I really, really like this so far." He gestures with their clasped hands in soft emphasis, and he watches Sirius smile to himself. "Truly. It's just a me thing. I babble when I'm nervous, but this is good nervous. I don't necessarily have the best rate of retention with people I date, so I'm really going against my own grain here and trying to be optimistic."

“Okay,” Sirius murmurs. He lifts the back of Remus’ hand to his lips, rolling to a steady stop at the red light two blocks from Remus’ building, and kisses him slowly. Remus feels himself blush and smiles in spite of it.

“Okay?”

Nodding, finally looking fully at Remus there in the passenger’s seat, lit from a low angle by the red-gold sun setting beyond the hills hemming them in here in the Valley, Sirius is truly breathtaking in a way Remus has never let himself believe could be real beyond the pages of romance novels. “Okay.”

The short spell of silence as they park, disembark, unhitch Remus’ bicycle, and latch it to the bike rack in Remus’ courtyard is comfortable. Remus nods Sirius around the corner to his unit before he stops himself and hangs his head in mock defeat. “Of course, you already know where we’re headed.”

A warm arm slips around Remus’ waist and tugs him near an equally warm side, Sirius’ low hum of a laugh vibrating pleasantly along Remus’ ribs. “Lead the way,” he says, entirely too close to Remus’ ear for propriety, and it’s all Remus can do not to simply drag him to the ground here in the courtyard and dissolve under the watchful eye of his entire apartment complex.

Of course Minnie greets them immediately when they enter the apartment.

“Minnie!”  _ Jesus, _ it’s just as endearing this time as it was that first morning to see Sirius stoop down and pick up the yowling little monster herself. She nestles into his arms and sets to purring as Sirius lavishes her with a barrage of his fingertips, and Remus lets himself openly stare this time at the way the bones of his joints flex with the motion.

“I think she’s missed you,” Remus says loftly, shrugging off his bag and leaning against the kitchn counter to watch Sirius cradle and cuddle Minerva. “Do you have a cat?”

“I mean, I should probably get one at this point, shouldn’t I?”

As if in objection to any other creature besides herself being on the receiving end of Sirius’ affection, Minerva meows up at him with a pathetic deflation of a sound. Sirius laughs. Remus’ heart pulls mightily toward the shores of adoration.

Eventually Sirius sets Minnie down, where she continues curling around his feet with pleasant little  _ blerp _ -ing sounds. Remus fiddles with the hem of his shirt. “Do you want to watch a movie, or something?”

Sirius seems to hesitate for the first time all evening. Somehow, it only makes him more desirable. Remus’ heart threatens to crack a rib as it picks up to nearly double-time when Sirius steps forward. His low voice is intimate, dangerous, entirely right; “Not really.”

It’s but another half a breath before Remus is shutting his eyes despite the visceral need to always be looking at Sirius, warm lips closing over his with a light inhale, and then he’s kissing Sirius Black in the middle of the kitchen that’s been resurrected by the man’s own hands half a dozen times before Remus even knew him.

He kisses back with quiet fervor, the sort only borne from weathering week after week coming home alone and becoming increasingly alright with the vague sense of loneliness pervading every other corner of his spaces. Remus takes Sirius by shoulders, clings to his solidity and his warmth and the outright beauty that seems to flow from his core in a ceaseless stream, and drowns in contentment.

Sirius backs him steadily against the counter and they stay there for a long time. Sirius takes his time with Remus in a way that’s entirely too sensual for Remus to properly process—licking slow and soft past Remus’ lips, stroking his neck, rubbing an auspicious thumb with encouraging reassurance at Remus’ waist, he’s everywhere at once and it’s perfect madness. Remus eventually has to pull back for air, tipping his face up to the ceiling as he draws on deep pulls of it, and Sirius decides to occupy himself in the meantime by leaning down to taste the curve of Remus’ throat.

_ “Fuck.”  _ Remus means to say something sexy, but his tongue shorts out and his eyes flutter shut as Sirius nuzzles into him. “You—we should go to the bed.”

An exaggerated inquisitive hum thrums against Remus’ neck alongside the dart of Sirius’ tongue. “Should we?”

Remus moves his hands from their desperate purchase on the back of Sirius’ shoulders up to the sides of his face and pulls Sirius’ gaze over to his own. Those grey irises are nothing but slim rings around massive pupils, and Remus can’t keep himself from stealing another sloppy kiss for himself before nodding. “We absolutely should.”

The jumbled stumbling into the bedroom is probably hilarious from anywhere outside their mess of limbs and clothing, Remus already tugging Sirius’ shirt up out of its tuck into his very fine belted jeans before he even nudges the door shut with his hip behind them.

“I suppose an invading cat might muddle the mood,” Sirius pants, pressing Remus back against the door and swiftly unbuttoning his shirt as he staggers to his knees and kisses a wet path down Remus’ chest and belly. 

“It—yep,” Remus gasps up to the ceiling, “I can’t even leave the door open when I jack off.”

Sirius chuckles against Remus’ left hip, a perfectly sinful sound, and Remus bites his lip as his shoulders leap with his own jag of laughter. “What, don’t like being watched?”

Boldness taking him over like a cloud passing in front of the sun, Remus reaches down and pushes his fingers into the quickly-unbraiding layers of Sirius’ hair at the crest of his widow’s peak. “I’m a little bit selfish,” he whispers. 

At that, Sirius growls—truly a growl, dark and low in his chest—and yanks open Remus’ belt. He pushes Remus’ slacks to the floor and reaches finally, his touch hallowed after so many days spent just having to  _ imagine _ it, into Remus’ boxer-briefs to find him hard and more than ready for Sirius.

“Well,” Sirius murmurs, drawing Remus out of his shorts and running the hand not guiding his cock up the panting flat of Remus’ lower ribs, “I’ll always let you be as selfish as you want.”

He closes his mouth around Remus and it’s distilled bliss after so long going without even another person’s presence beside him. Remus throws his head back against the door and chokes on a gasp, half-voiced, his hand in Sirius’ hair tightening instinctively. He manages not to snap his hips forward but Sirius’ tongue makes it harder and harder to hold still. Remus can’t look down at him because he knows the second he does he’ll burst, so he waits until he feels the twinge of his limit approaching around the corner before looking down desperately at the sight of Sirius tending to him in an ardent kneel.

“Slow down, I—we sh—should fuck,” Remus manages to rasp, his body beginning to tremble. Sirius finishes the slow drag of a particularly deep stroke of his mouth before pulling off and thumbing a touch of saliva away from the corner of his mouth. He looks very pleased with himself. Remus can’t imagine that  _ pleased _ even begins to cover it, if the lump in Sirius’ jeans is any tell of the stakes.

“Agreed. Your call, fuck or be fucked?”

Remus stares down at this image of Sirius before him, on his knees, hair a wreck, shirt open, body looking hammered from raw bronze, and imagines the twinned perfection of Sirius both burying himself in Remus and riding Remus’ cock. It makes Remus twitch in his grasp, and Remus has to blink a few times before lucidity finds him again. “I want you to fuck me,” he whispers, aching sharply and very suddenly for the long-absent feeling of being filled by someone who knows what the fuck they’re doing. 

As Sirius stands and pulls a condom from his wallet, kissing Remus again as he goes, Remus is very sure that Sirius  _ absolutely _ knows what the fuck he’s doing.

“Lube?” Sirius asks into the space under Remus’ ear as he kisses Remus down onto the mattress. Remus flails out with one hand, scrabbling at the drawer of his bedside table, and makes a vague sound of thanks when Sirius helps him open it and remove the half-empty bottle. Remus has already made quick work of Sirius’ own clothing, leveling the playing field and almost coming to pieces at the sight of Sirius’ heavy, gorgeous cock, and so anticipation builds in Remus to a fever pitch as Sirius uncaps the bottle and beads a dollop of the gel onto his middle finger. “Tell me,” he murmurs, the shapes of his tattoos rippling slightly on his forearm as he rubs his finger and thumb together, “when you feel ready.”

Remus closes his eyes in the bloom of another kiss when Sirius leans down again, curving over Remus’ body as his thumb presses softly at Remus’ entrance. He slicks it slowly, all around, as careful and steady and intent as his kisses, and Sirius only moves to slip his finger in after Remus lets out an airy sound of encouragement around his tongue.

His hands are just as delicate moving against Remus’ body as they were to hold in his own, and Remus finds himself reduced to jelly again as Sirius ever so slowly twists and presses and very slightly crooks his fingers inside Remus. He’s whispering very gentle nothings as he goes, kissing along every plain of Remus’ face, letting Remus cling hard to the solidity of the arm he has braced beside Remus’ head on the mattress—it’s a sudden brush against the perfect angle that sends a bolt of red and a shuddering cry through Remus, arching up into Sirius and beginning, “Now,  _ fuck, _ Sirius, I’m ready now, fuck me, f—”

“Easy, easy,” Sirius lulls him, slowly removing his finger and reaching for a tissue as he shifts his weight back onto his haunches there between Remus’ knees and wipes off his hand. He tears open the condom carefully and applies another little bit of lube to the head of his cock, raising an eyebrow and Remus as he holds up the still-rolled condom. “Want to put it on, or should I?”

“Whatever gets you back inside me the quickest,” Remus grumbles, his head thrown sideways into the bed because  _ Shit, _ it’s both the hottest and most uncomfortable thing for him to say, but it’s the fucking truth. It’s as if he’s been magnetized and Sirius is pulling him with polar ferocity, nearer and nearer with such a draw that the only satisfaction can be found in getting as close to him as physically possible. 

“Hey, I told you you could be selfish, don’t be embarrassed.” Sirius’ voice is gentle as dusk itself as he pinches and rolls the condom down easily over his cock and applies more lube around the outside, shifting those corded legs of his to line up carefully alongside Remus. Remus’ own body is quite well-hewn by all his cycling—the plague of a terribly limited diet and an awful sleep schedule keeping him from the bulkier sort of musculature he might have if he actually had time to train in earnest—but Sirius’ body is something after which old war ballads could have been written. Every inch of him feels perfectly toned, looks the deepest kind of delectable, tastes and smells like conquering itself. High on proximity, Remus arches into Sirius’ touch as it rings around his hips.

“You’re really fantastic,” he says on a whim, drawing Sirius’ eyes up with a snap of something that looks like adoration. Sirius smiles that sideways smile of his.

“Takes one to know one, Remus.”

Sirius slips into him slowly, more slowly than his finger but with just as much attention and encouragement in his touch. A groove between his eyebrows pops up at one point as he pauses to breathe, let Remus adjust to his size, tighten the glorious grip of his fingers around Remus’ waist, and Remus reaches up to stroke it with his thumb. They share a long look, gulping down shallow heaves of air and clinging to whatever angles of one another’s bodies they can grasp as they go, and Sirius turns to ease one of Remus’ legs up to rest on his shoulder before he presses a kiss to Remus’ shin just below his knee and resumes slipping deeper into Remus.

“I’m in,” Sirius gasps after several long moments. Remus nods wildly, his eyes screwed shut with bliss and the steady pressure of being filled clashing in him, and twitches his hips.

“Fuck me.” The bid comes out on a groan, a plea for Sirius to help him chase ecstasy like fading sunlight, and Sirius does him the pleasure of listening.

Their rhythm starts slow, led by Remus’ pace, the shallow cant of two people finding each other pressed close for the very first time. Sirius seems hesitant to take over eventually, spurred by Remus’ panting and babbling need— _ Yes, please, oh, Sirius, yes _ —but once he finds the angle that makes Remus gasp again so suddenly around a shout that it comes out more like his own little mewl Sirius takes the reins to see Remus over into the glittering fields of brief oblivion.

“Can— _ ah, _ do you want to get on top?”

Sirius is driving into him from such a perfectly addling position that Remus is nearly seeing stars but he nods, hungry for any and all sides of Sirius. They maneuver clumsily and smoothly at once, their elbows and shins knocking a couple times but Sirius staying in to the hilt, until Sirius is on his back and Remus is straddled over him in half-lidded, cock-twitching paradise. “Hold onto me,” Remus pants, pulling Sirius’ hands back down to his own hips, “ _ tight.” _

The behest made, Sirius obeys. 

It’s mere minutes in their new setup that sees Remus pressed hard against climax, Sirius’ fingertips digging sweetly into Remus’ skin as Remus arches and bucks smoothly against every thrust. “I—” he chokes out, his breath high in his throat, and his heart right there next to it as he looks down at the masterpiece sight of Sirius dissolving alongside him into the throes of euphoria; “Fuck, Sirius, ‘m gonna come.”

“Me too.” Sirius burns his stare into Remus’ and it’s almost too much,  _ fuck, _ it’s almost too fucking much—”Touch yourself, come for me.”

Remus lets out a shapeless pule of sound, pleading himself or his orgasm or Sirius to bear witness to this,  _ Look, look at what kind of beauty you can dredge up when you find someone who resonates with you; _ whomever it is they acquiesce, pull Remus over the threshold of presence by his navel—Remus’ wrist stutters and his cock twitches sharply, his breath catching, and right as Sirius’ gasping mounts to its own crux and Remus feels Sirius going rigid inside of him, he spills in a stunning burst across Sirius’ chest and stomach. They ride out one another’s crest, Remus feeling Sirius fill him while Sirius strokes a fevered and approving hand up and down Remus’ flank, and once they’re both back down to earth Remus is the first to speak up.

“Tissues,” he mumbles. His arms are already beginning to shake so he doesn’t know how on earth Sirius makes it look so easy to just reach out above his head and grab a handful of tissues for him. He wads them in one torporous hand and shimmies off of Sirius with a contorted maneuver, and Remus leaves Sirius to clean himself off while he ducks into the bathroom to take care of his own mess.

They switch places when Remus emerges, teeth brushed briskly and contacts removed, and Remus is in his pajamas with a pair of glasses on by the time Sirius comes back into the bedroom. His hair is tied back up, his nakedness is still enviably perfect, and Remus is suddenly aware he doesn’t have anything to lend him for an overnight stay.

“Ah, I have a spare sweatshirt but it...probably won’t fit you.” Remus plucks a little absently at Sirius’ shoulder, indicating his broadness, but Sirius only smiles and drops a tender kiss onto Remus’ forehead.

“I sleep naked.”

“You already fucked me, you know, we’re past the ridiculous seduction stage.”

“Are we? I was under the impression that was ongoing.”

Remus rolls his eyes, but the swell in his heart is evidenced by the way Sirius’ gaze tracks him affectionately as Remus slides under the covers. “Only if you play your cards right.”

“You know,” Sirius muses as he obeys Remus’ patting on the mattress beside him to come in as well, “I can’t decide if you look cuter with or without glasses.”

“Alright, now you’re just showing your hand.”

Sirius laughs and Remus smiles, and he cues the lights in the apartment down to full dark before double-checking his alarm for the morning is set. “Fancy,” Sirius whistles.

“I have a pink LED setting for sex,” Remus says arily into the warmth of Sirius’ chest as they automatically fold into an embrace under the covers. “You’re only lucky I didn’t have the wherewithal to use it tonight.”

He’s only half-joking.

—

**_CLASSIC REBOOT CONFIRMED FOR RELEASE TUESDAY_ **

_ Rita Skeeter — Sunday at 8:18PM _

_ It looks like our Expecto East source was the real deal, folks. Lumos Softworks has confirmed that an official announcement of their latest project is coming this Tuesday, September 17th, along with “something big and unexpected.” _

_ This could be the evidence our source mentioned of combining Azkaban’s original numerous expansions into one title, but it could also be hinting at something different. I, for one, am thinking this might point to a demo of some kind dropping along with the announcement. _

_ New, playable Azkaban in 2019 would be the cherry on top of a year already PACKED with solid gaming news. _

_ What do you think Lumos has in store for us? Comment down below, let’s get this Azzie train running at full speed! _

—

“Dude.”

Remus spins his chair to face Dorcas and gives her an expectant look. “Dude,” he enunciates clearly around a sip of his tea. Dorcas smirks.

“Have a good date?”

_ Understatement, _ Remus wants to shout, tear through the office and scream at the top of his lungs that they already have plans to meet up again tomorrow after the build clears, and this time at Sirius’ place. He settles for shrugging. “It was alright, yeah, we had fun.”

They had woken up this morning an hour before Remus’ alarm, both of them hard and eager to greet the day from the other end of another dazzling orgasm, which concluded in a complete losing track of time and saw Remus about twenty minutes late to the office wearing, if one looked closely enough, yesterday’s slacks and a sweatshirt that in no way matched them.  _ Fun _ was yet another understatement of the entire century.

“Fun,” Dorcas hums, tapping at her tablet screen as though simply talking about her favorite template setups. “That means it was either great or awful. I think I have some idea, so mind telling me before I guess?”

“What else to tell? It was fun, he’s really cool, I like him a lot, all that jazz.” Remus hopes his irritability isn’t showing through, hopes Dorcas doesn’t give a shit about what he wears to work each day, would  _ really _ like not to talk about mind-blowing sex in the middle of the office—notwithstanding the amount of times lately he’s  _ thought _ about mind-blowing sex here, but that’s neither here nor there.

Dorcas nods coolly, looking like she might drop the subject, but she gestures at Remus with the tip of her stylus. “Well, you might want to cover up the ‘fun’ little mark you have there.”

Remus pales, immediately slapping a hand to cover the spot he very vividly remembers Sirius sucking on his neck while fucking him hard from behind. Dorcas cackles. This, it seems, is going to be the new normal for a little while longer.

Deep down, past all the taking-himself-too-seriously and wishing to blend into the wallpaper seven times out of ten at the office so he can just  _ do his goddamn work, _ Remus finds that he doesn’t mind that face in the slightest when Sirius is there as the end result.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks so much for reading, feel free to stop by [on Tumblr](https://chromat1cs.tumblr.com/) and say hi :>


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